


lost and fought

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 09:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8439856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: Karen hasn't slept in far too long, trying to chase leads about this gang-cult, when her dead mentor appears in her apartment and chaos descends. She doesn't think it's due to sleep deprivation.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ejunkiet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ejunkiet/gifts).



> A gift fic for ejunkiet for the Kastle Halloween fic exchange. I hope you enjoy m'dear!

Karen stares at her cup of coffee like it’s betrayed her.

It’s Tuesday – or maybe Wednesday – she’s hip deep in an article about a cult-like gang who’ve started to make waves in the crime world. Which would be normal, but she hasn't gotten more than a few hours of sleep total in the past week and the world is starting to blur before her eyes.

The coffee was supposed to help – was supposed to fend off the hallucinations so she could get this done.

She’s finally adjusted to the sound of marching in her head – she's knows it's just awareness of the blood rushing in her veins, but it sounds like a battalion of Civil War soldiers converging on her location. But the flicks of movement out of the corner of her eyes are distracting – and as much as she tells herself not to look she can't help herself. 

She’s never hallucinated Ben.

Well.

She’s had dreams where he was there – sitting in her kitchen, or being killed by Fisk or, in one very unpleasant instance, being killed by her (she’d woken up and immediately called Ellis and refused the story she’d been considering doing for him) – but she’s never seen him when she was awake. 

So.

She must have fallen asleep.

She scowls more at her coffee cup and then reaches out and takes a defiant sip – it’s so hot it burns the tip of her tongue and –

Pain.

She can feel pain.

 She blinks, blearily, and looks back up; Ben is still there.

Karen puts the mug down and pinches her arm as she stands on unsteady feet and pads around her coffee table.

Ben smiles and Karen reaches out a hand towards him. Her fingers go through his shoulder and she blinks again. He holds out his hands and shrugs, his expression kind and warm while still making her feel like she’s missing something – it’s an expression he’s aimed at her before and she’s impressed with herself for hallucinating it so clearly, when he suddenly looks serious and steps towards her.

 She steps back, even though she knows she’s hallucinating him – she must be – and he continues forward, one step at a time and even though she tells herself to stand her ground she  _can’t_  because part of her wants him to be real so bad that she doesn’t want to walk through him and – he backs her into her closet and then mimes closing the door and she does because she’s come this far –

 And that’s when she hears the scratching at her front door. Not the kind of scratching an animal makes, but metal against metal and – they are clearly over prepared if they brought lock picks. Her landlord still hasn’t fixed the apartment since the last time it was busted into, and while she has a very intimidating looking lock on the door, it does nothing – and the chain hardly stays in half the time and –

 She really needs to move.

 She slips her phone from her pocket and makes sure it’s on silent and dims the light setting, preparing a text to Matt just in case, because even if they still aren’t talking he’ll still show up to help her if people are breaking into her place. She doesn’t send it though – instead peering through the small crack in the door and watching, waiting. It’s not just that she doesn’t want to deal with him rescuing her, although she’ll definitely admit it plays a part, it’s that she wants to know what they’re after. Clearly she’s on the right path for one of her stories, and she wants to know which one so she can hit them even harder.

Three men pad quietly into her apartment – the lone light of the lamp by the couch the only illumination – two of them are white, the third one swarthier but she can’t tell ethnicity from that. Each of them is dressed in street clothes – nondescript and forgettable – except for the pendants. They look like snowflakes made of eyes, each of them about the size of a bread plate. Two of them are blue, the third red.

Ben, standing next to her in the closet, holds a finger to his lips and she wonders if he thought she was going to say something, because she  _wasn’t_  but her glare doesn’t seem to faze him at all.

 He steps sideways, into her, and there’s no chill, nothing to make her feel like there’s a ghost there, but when she looks down at her arm she can see Ben’s arm instead, his jacket so exactly like the one she saw him in, even the stains and fraying threads and she wonders abruptly if maybe there’s a gas leak in her house. That might explain the fact that she’s clearly awake and clearly hallucinating.

“Nobody here but souls, boss,” says one of the men – accent so stereotypically Texan that she assumes it’s fake.

The man with the red pendent crouches by her coffee table, hand hovering over her still steaming cup and raises an eyebrow. “Check again, she was just here.”

The man who’d spoken first, shrugs, but pulls up his pendent and peers into it and – Karen clasps a hand over her mouth as two more eyes open on his face, below his other eyes and he stares into the necklace and then drops it with a shrug – the other eyes blinking closed and vanishing. “Just ghosts, boss." 

“Maybe,” says the third man, his accent something rolling and smooth she doesn’t recognize, “she had a lead. She’s a good little reporter, isn’t she?” He has all her files on the crime cult in his hand and, well, at least she knows who they’re associated with. They haven’t touched any of the other files.

She’s glad she’s started making so many backups – digital and hardcopy – after the last time her place was raided.

“Fine,” says the boss, red pendent glowing slightly as he stands, “lets go.”

They leave just as quickly as they came, locking the door behind them and – if not for the missing documents and the fact that she saw the whole thing – she never would’ve known they were there at all.

***

It takes seven days (including two solid nights of sleep, twelve stake-outs and five ill advised sweeps of empty warehouses) before she finds any more information on the cult. It’s during the second hour of her surveillance of the old factory when the cars start arriving. She’s far enough away that even through her binoculars she can’t make out much, but each car contains at least one man in a business suit and one in a robe.

Naturally she wants a closer look.

Ben is at her side – as he has been _nearly_ this entire time – and he gives a sigh she can hear even though it makes no noise, and follows her.

The grip of her gun is cool in her hand as she slowly eases around the building, looking for the back door she knows is there – there are two hulking men who look oddly greenish in the pre-dawn haze standing guard at the front door.

The back door is barred with an old rotting piece of wood, but before she can check to see how loud removing it is going to be there’s a growl from the pile of rubble to the side of the door and she moves, swinging her gun around and taking a step back and –

 It’s not a dog.

Or. It _is_ a dog – if Dr. Frankenstein had been a vet.

“Holy hell,” she breathes out, her breath fogging before her, and the patchwork nightmare bares its teeth – given the worn look of the rest of it, they’re distressingly white and sharp. “Um,” she tries, softening her voice as best she can while still whispering, she doesn’t want to shoot it, and not just because it’ll alert the gathering she’s there, but she definitely cannot out run it and, “good dog?”

The dog tilts its mismatched and oddly large head, one eye is yellow and the other brown she can see now and wags.

“Who’s a good monster dog?” she asks, reflexively, and the dog wags harder and that’s when she sees the chain that’s around it’s neck and far too tight and – “Oh! You poor thing.” She takes a step forward too quickly and the dog backs up and growls again and she has to step back and take a deep breath, putting her gun in her purse and crouching down to shuffle forward. She starts to talk nonsense to it, softly enough that no one can hopefully overhear her, and keeps moving ever closer.

 Finally, finally, she’s able to pet it – and it wiggles into her hands excitedly and she manages to slip the loop of chain off its head as it licks at her chin. The fur around its neck is rubbed raw and bare in places, matted in others where a longer haired dog was used in place of a shorthair and its weeping clear pus in places. “There,” she says, placing the chain on the ground and patting the dog on its head, “you’re free.”

The dog licks her chin again and then sits and as much as she’d love to pet it some more – it’s monstrous and alarming but is still just a puppy – she is here on a mission and she could be missing important information, so she carefully stands and brushes herself off and goes to try to get into the door.

Ten minutes, splinters in places she doesn’t want to think about and one broken door later she’s got a front row seat to the meeting of the gang. The men in robes have thrown the hoods back and…they look like the dog out back, patchwork humans. They’re mottled and some of them have clear stitch marks and – she’s so caught up in looking at them that it takes her far too long to realize _what_ the group of thirty is circled around.

Luckily when she realizes they’re making enough noise not to hear her gasp of horror – or maybe not luckily since the noise they’re making is some sort of chanting as they carve up what she really hopes are dead bodies. It’s definitely a ritual – she recognizes the men from her apartment and they still have those amulets that are glowing and so do some of the other men and –

Oh.

They’re eating some of the bodies.

She can’t help but gag, and while her gasp went unnoticed, this does not – but she’s close to the door and there’s old equipment and boxes between them and her so she’s almost to her car before one of the men who’ve been chasing grab her by the hair and –

That’s when the dog comes back, taking the man’s arm off with a powerful bite and –

“Patches,” she says, shakily, while merging into traffic as the patch-work pup wags in her front seat, “I’m going to call you Patches.”

***

“Oh fuck,” she snarls, pushing her hair back behind an ear with the back of her hand and holding tight to the needle with the other hand. “You could help, you know.” She’s not expecting him to answer – she knows he can’t – but she’s sure Ben is shrugging helplessly outside her line of sight as she inexpertly tries to stich up Patches.

Patches whines pitifully, but stays still as she reattaches his leg.

She really, really,  _really_  hopes that whatever has animated Patches isn’t going to abandon the leg now that it’s been severed once. It’s her fault – she knew better than trying to go back to her apartment after they’d seen her, but she hadn’t been ready to go on the run and it’s not like she has the disposable income to buy new clothes everyday.

Karen swears again, then bites off the thread and ties it up as Patches wags.

“There,” she says, petting his lopsided stitched together head while his tongue lolls and he wags hard enough to shake his mismatched rear end, “what do you think?”

“I think the company you’re keeping has gotten even stranger, ma’am.”

Patches growls and limps between her and Frank, his fur standing on end.

She reaches out to hold him back – fingers gentle at where his skin is still rubbed raw – and looks up at where Frank is standing.

Karen hasn’t seen him since that night on the roof and – he looks good.

He’s still haunted, eyes not quite steady and finger tapping, but he’s been eating healthy and he doesn’t have any obvious new injuries.

“Frank,” she says, still crouched down, once the silence has stretched for more than a minute.

“Ma’am,” he says, tipping his head slightly and then crouching down and holding out a hand. “And…company.”

“Patches,” she says, and then glances, reflexively, over her shoulder where Ben is watching them with his head tilted slightly to the side.

“Patches,” he says, lips tugging up and eyes lighting in a way she doesn’t think she’s ever seen – and she’s hit again with sorrow for what happened to him and how much he, of all people, didn’t deserve any of it.

Patches isn’t growling anymore, and so she carefully releases his hold, and says, to the too smart dog, “Patches, this is Frank. He’s…” she hesitates, looks at Frank and tries the word cautiously, “a friend.” His expression doesn’t change for that, but it does when Patches takes a faltering step forward to sniff at his hand and then allows Frank to scratch his head.

***

They’re stuck in a building that is swarming with franken-zombies and cultists and Karen really wishes that this didn’t feel so _normal_ to her. Patches is pressed up tight against her leg and Ben is wringing his hands together next to her and Frank is sitting at partially constructed kitchen island like he’s at home, fingers moving quickly over his disassembled gun.

“Shooting the monsters – they aren’t really _alive_.” So much of her research is useless for this, and most of what she’s found is from her own encounters with them trying to kill her, but, well, it’s more than Frank has – all he knew was a new gang was on the street. So she’s trying.

 “Yeah, I got that,” he says, dryly, fingers moving deftly over metal and plastic. 

She huffs out a breath and holds her hands up, “I don’t know what else to tell you. One of the group is always the animator, or necromancer, or…whatever – if you kill him the rest should fall.”

“Huh,” he says, and glances at Patches. “You think…?”

Her hand drops reflexively to the dog and she tries not to let her terror show – she hadn’t thought about it but – she can’t think about it. She knows Frank’s going to leave as soon as this is taken care of and she’s guessing Ben is only around because of something the cult has done so he’ll probably leave too and –

She’d assumed she’d still have Patches at the end and she’s not quite willing to deal with the reality yet. 

She looks away from Frank and tries to get herself back under control and he stays silent for several long moments. “Well,” he finally says, and she glances back and his eyes are carefully on her as he reassembles his gun without any issues, “I think you have a better sense of this than I do. Who do I kill, ma’am?”

She lets out a shaky breath and nods. She can do this. She can point out the living to him, so that they stop throwing the dead at them.

***

This is not the first time she’s woken up in a warehouse with no memory of getting there – not even the second – and she wonders if that means she needs to reevaluate her priorities in life.

So she sets her jaw and raises her head and – the man’s eyes are glowing red and the pendent around his neck is glowing eerie lavender and – she really hopes Frank kills him.

Frank will take care of Patches (if Patches lives – Frank, she knows, won’t let these evil idiots kill him) and hopefully get revenge for her and –

God, she hopes Matt doesn’t give him too much trouble for this. It’s not Frank’s fault – it’s hers and –

Four more robbed figures come from the side and one of them is carrying a book and – she’s not even getting a villain monologue, they’re just going to kill her. This is really lame.

And then Ben is there – and he’s reaching out to her with his hands and she can’t move her arms, she knows because she’s tried, but somehow he pulls them up and – oh.

Her flesh is behind and he’s dragging _her_ out of her body and –

Time doesn’t mean anything to a soul-spirit-ghost – but she’s still attached to her physical form and Ben shows her how to do what he can’t – without words but with emotions and –

She doesn’t really have sense, where she is, so she doesn’t feel anything but vague intrigue when the men in robes surrounding the collapsed woman erupt into flames – her doing, or when bullets start to rain down (she should know who, shouldn’t she? Yes.) and then there’s silence and she starts to drift but the one who was shooting is over the collapsed woman and he reaches out to touch her and she wonders why she’s still there and –

It hurts.

Settling back into her body is a shock – feeling returning like lightning dancing along her skin – and she only has a moment to lie there and try to breathe before Frank is crushing her to his chest.

 It hurts less, somehow, held there and able to smell the bloody gunpowder on him and feel the frantic beating of his heart.

 “Don’t –“ he’s mumbling something into her hair – or maybe he’s not mumbling, maybe her hearing hasn’t come back fully yet. She breathes, his voice a comforting growl in her ears and then suddenly there are words and – he’s just repeating the same thing over and over again: “Don’t you dare do that again – don’t you die on me – I can’t –“

Oh, she thinks, he loves me too.

 It seems so obvious now.

Her fingers curl into his shirt and she somehow manages to shift enough that he stops talking and peers down at her and – she doesn’t have much strength back yet, but he doesn’t resist when she curls her fingers around the back of his head and tugs him down until his mouth meets hers.

As kisses go, she’s certainly had better, she’s barely conscious and her lips are moving sluggishly – she can see his eyes are wet with tears and he’s holding very still and moving very slowly and – as kisses go, it’s not the best. As first kisses go, it’s one she’ll never forget.

“We’ll practice,” she says, and then goes limp in his arms – still alive, soul still in her body, just unconscious. 


End file.
